Ludwig Kaltenburg was to initiate me into the laws of the animal world, show me what they could do and where their limits were, where we humans make unreasonable demands on animals and are disappointed when they don’t live up to our expectations. Why is it that children turn so willingly to such minor players as Professor Kaltenburg and are prepared to forgive them everything? Since he was competing with the professor, my father had not the least chance of prevailing with his own son.
It wasn’t until three decades later that I discovered the real cause of the break between Kaltenburg and my father. I wasn’t trying to find out, it simply hit me in the face one day, I couldn’t avoid it, and to this day it gives me a stab of pain to the heart whenever I think how late the discovery came, too late for me to apologize to my long-dead father and take his side.
11
WHERE DID I FIRST SEE that image of crows? In its density, its darkness, a flock of uniformly black rooks, among them a few hooded crows, I could easily make them out by their gray markings. And now the gray patches were wheeling away, drawing the black ones with them, the cloud lurched to one side and out of the picture.
“They said on the radio that Paris has been liberated.”
My father tapped the cigarette ash on the side of his cup. It sizzled in the cold tea. Astonished, he raised his eyes from his newspaper and pushed the cup aside. “Not a word about these things outside this house, remember, not to your friends, not at school,” he said to me, as though he’d given too much away.
I can still see the way my mother laughed, though I can’t remember why, I can see her freshly starched white blouse. Was it the same one she wore for Kaltenburg’s last visit? Irritated, my father folded the newspaper.
“What an unbearably stupid rag.”
And my mother, getting a clean cup from the cupboard: “Oh come on, don’t take it so much to heart.”
By then it was a long time since we’d had any visitors. Professor Kaltenburg was on active service, from what we’d heard Knut must be in Crete, and we had no idea where Martin was. My father lit another cigarette, glanced out at the garden, suddenly the room was filled with bright sunshine, the stove, the edge of the armchair, and the triangle on the carpet, my father narrowed his eyes as though hatching a plan.
There they sat with their son in the drawing room, this ill-matched couple, my parents. My mother, with hair pinned up, was brushing at the cloth on the small table as though there were crumbs to sweep away. She was always drawn to the city, and at first she may not have been altogether keen on this house at the edge of the fields. “But just think of the child,” my father will have said, and she had given way, her husband needed to be close to nature, in the concrete desert among so many people he would wither away, and it wasn’t that far to the tram terminus, to the stores, cafés, and arcades. Building work on the castle had stopped some time before.
Another event comes to mind — when was it, on the same day he mentioned Paris, did it follow Professor Kaltenburg’s disappearance, and was there some connection between the two things?
Of course, at that time my father had to work on useful plants. Cereal yields needed to be increased. There was a feverish race on to replace petroleum with vegetable oils. New medicines were required for the wounded. But his private greenhouse was his own domain, for a long time my father had succeeded in fending off all claims on it. His wild grasses he owed to the wind, to the animals, and to travelers who unwittingly brought back seeds from all over the world, on their shoes, on their sleeves. And the specially heated corner for exotics — I can remember the times when I was allowed to put my hand into the glass casing, very still, warm — and my father was scared that even a grownup like Professor Kaltenburg might be careless enough to break off a bloom.
Yet now, in the wake of the intensive educational measures introduced for his son’s benefit, the botanist had become passionate about bird life. Which, as one can well imagine, created considerable problems, since birds do not just perch picturesquely on branches and savor the amenities offered by plants, rather in the manner of museum visitors; they are also inclined to feed on this attractive display. All the same, my father continued to bring birds into the house, and never once complained as, in the course of time, they devoured everything. It even seemed to me that he actually encouraged the birds to help themselves to the rarest specimens in the botanical inventory, and derived immense pleasure — verging on insanity, as I now think — from seeing whether a native bird enjoyed the flavor of a foreign flower. But perhaps he was pleased because, like any other child, I took a boundless delight in this destruction, not, as some people would imagine, out of childish brutality, but because of a child’s certainty that this world, which for adults is solid and fixed, is continuously changing. When I think what our conservatory looked like toward the end…
Presumably at some point, from one day to the next, my father was forced to replace the collection he had painstakingly assembled in the greenhouse over the years. That’s how I see it today. A moment which must have represented a great defeat for him. To me it was a riotous plant-feast. Perhaps that helped my father take his mind off the despair.
Early in the evening he came to fetch me from the kitchen, where I was sitting as my mother and nanny were planning the coming week. He put a finger to his lips, I was supposed to slip out of the kitchen unobtrusively — yet everybody except me was surely in the know about what was going on. I followed him into the conservatory, which scarcely warranted its name of “winter garden,” since by then it contained hardly any green plants, just bare, half-chewed stems with a few isolated dried-out leaves languishing in their pots. My father told me to entice the tame bird we had reared out of its cage, which always stood open. Was it the nameless starling? Or another bird, a blackbird? I can’t remember. Walking through the garden, my father held the bird carefully, only releasing it when we had reached the greenhouse and the door was shut behind us.
Apparently everything had been planned well in advance, my father had made a space by clearing away pots and tools and had brought in garden chairs. Hour after hour, until it got dark, we watched the bird setting about the plants, rooting around in the garden mold, plucking the fresh shoots, and pecking fiercely at the juicy leaves until they were an indefinable green mass, more like chopped spinach. We sat watching as though spellbound, made friendly bets on which plant the bird would move on to next, trying to outdo each other in estimating how much damage an individual plant would suffer.
I woke up in the middle of the night. From the garden came a regular scraping noise, interrupted by a longish pause. I didn’t get up, didn’t go to the window, I didn’t even open my eyes. I knew: my father was sweeping up the plant debris next to the greenhouse. The next day all the beds were freshly laid out with castor-oil plants.
12
IT WAS VERY EARLY in the morning, not yet light. I listened. Nobody in the house seemed to be awake. Ice on my window, not a glimpse of the world outside. But if I was the only one awake, then I was alone, because it meant my nanny wasn’t up yet either, and she always got up before us and lit the oven. I left the bedroom in my pajamas, no light in the corridor, and as I was placing one bare foot in front of the other on the stairs, half hesitant and half impatient, a word came to my mind. I didn’t know what it meant, I didn’t know where I’d heard it, but I could hear it being spoken quietly in my nanny’s voice: “Jerzyk.”